Revolutionary Russia The Challenge of Revolution: Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective, by Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, New York: Oxford University Press, 369pp. By Daniel Treisman They are the great stories of modern history. Oliver Cromwell in the House of Commons stamping his feet to call in the soldiers, and berating the members individually as they fled: “Thou art a whore master… Thou art a drunkard and a glutton…” Boston’s patriots dressed up as Indians, hurling crates of tea into the harbor. The artisans of Paris swarming into the Bastille and parading through the streets with its governor’s head upon a pike. Lenin’s band overpowering the women’s battalion to occupy the Winter Palace. To this list, Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya would add the case of Boris Yeltsin clambering upon a tank to lecture the reactionary putschists of August 1991. Russia, they argue in their erudite and often fascinating book, underwent not just a transition or a transformation in the 1990s but a social revolution. Mau, a junior minister in Putin’s government and academic by training, and Starodubrovskaya, a former analyst in the World Bank’s Moscow office, are among the most perceptive observers of contemporary Russian events. They are not the first to use the vocabulary of revolution to describe Russia’s experiences. (Michael McFaul’s recent book on Russian politics, for instance, includes the word in its title.) Unlike most others, however, their usage is not rhetorical but literal.